wii are familii...

Fucking hell... did anyone else get a Wii for Xmas? Has anyone else spent the last week inventing a whole list of new RULES because your children are incapable of extrapolating the rules of common courtesy to cover the realm of this new device?

* Do not STAND between the person playing Wii and the television.
* Do not TOUCH or POKE or STAND REALLY CLOSE to the person playing Wii.
* Do not offer your opinion on how the person playing the Wii might improve his or her performance UNLESS THEY ASK YOU TO.

They are driving me slightly insane.

Edited to add... the cats also need to learn that Wii-Time is not Kitty-Time. The eldest feline already got a Wiimote upside the skull (Bowling) as a reminder of what happens if you try to apporach the Humans when they are waving a Wiimote about. We'll see if she learns her lesson.

big vacation accomplishment #1...

I have purged my top dresser drawer of all faded, saggy, and unmatched black socks.

Hey... it's a start.

done...

Submitted grades for the last of my three classes tonight, with a full 1h 49m to spare.

It feels good to be done, now the only question is... how do I make the next three weeks or so relatively productive. As in... what do I do between now and the 21st besides play Wii.

There is house stuff... work stuff... long-term stuff. Not to mention a talk in Baltimore to prep for and family stuff that I'm trying very hard to avoid thinking about.

I should have a "plan".

twas the night after xmas, and all thru the house...

... everyone held their biceps, and all wimpered "ouch"!

Love the Wii. Just wish I had some better games. I hope that some of the pro-style sports game manufacturers have a tennis and a boxing game in the works that have more precise control and more realistic graphics. Because I really love the Wii Sports, but it could clearly be SO much better.

The only RPG I got (Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn) kinda sucks. And I have to wait until my Mom comes to visit (after new year's!!) to get Zelda and whatever else she bought me. Sad.

Anyway. The house is a wreck, and I have to think about grades again REALLY soon. Merry Xmas.

"i wanna strepto-cocco-mus for christ-maaaaas..."

The Girl has strep throat. The only remaining question is what fraction of us will be sick on Xmas morning.

Tiny sliver lining... the wife says we don't have to go to Church tonight.

2 big accomplishments...

* Physics exams - GRADED!
* Xmas presents - WRAPPED!

keep moving, nothing to see here...

I would post something about the Holiday Open House Craft Party we had at our house today, but that would require me to admit that I allowed such a thing to happen in my home, which I refuse to do.

pardon my nerdgasm, but...

SQUEEEEEEEEEEAL!!!!!!

i'm glad i checked before... you know... JANUARY!!

Apparently I'm presenting at the AAPT conference on January 21st in Baltimore. You know how I found out? By downloading the program and coming across my own name!! Nice of them to let me know. Jesus.

Anyway... a recent talk on the CV will help with the tenure review in the summer, so... yay.

brief holiday rant...

Have the people who design and manufacture Christmas ornaments ever actually DECORATED a Christmas tree? They need to hire some fucking structural engineers to inform them that there is a practical limit to the load that can be supported by a small, dead, evergreen tree. We have ornaments in our (absurdly extensive!) collection that would bend the trunk of a god damned giant sequioa. I think one of our Santa Clauses may be made of depleted uranium.

a mountain of molehills...

The sheer volume of minutiae I have to deal with between now and 2 weeks from now is... paralyzing. A meeting here, a document there, a letter of recommendation... my inbox is so jammed with Little Things That Need Doing that it's hard to know where to start. And that's not even to mention the Borg Cube stack of Xmas bins that currently looms unopened in the living room, ready to assimilate the house in festive holiday knick-knackery. Then there are 3 christmas concerts and 2 work parties...

I'm asking Santa for a personal assistant this Xmas.

festive...

Well, I survived the Boy's birthday party. More importantly, I survived the preparations for the Boy's birthday party - without strangling my wife, it should be noted.

WE NEED TO GET A TREE TODAY! EVEN THOUGH THERE IS A PARTY TOMORROW AND WE WON'T HAVE TIME TO DECORATE IT AND THE HOUSE IS STILL A WRECK! IT'S DECEMBER 8TH!! WE MUST HAVE A NAKED, UNADORNED PINE TREE IN THE HOUSE BEFORE THE PARTY!!

Every fucking year, people.

Anyway. It's over. The less said about it, the better.

icee...

The outside is frozen today. I almost slipped and fell walking on the LAWN, it's so icy this morning.

I saw some horses grazing on the way to work today. How do you think horses feel about eating grass that is covered in a half inch of ice? Does it hurt their teeth? Or is it like a frozen treat?

instead of goodbye he says "ciao"...

Oh boy... there's no seatmate I enjoy more on the train than The Class A Corporate Dickwad, who clearly intends to conduct a full day's business via his cellphone over the next hour and a half, loudly enough for everyone else on the train to hear. Hey, Buddy... I'm pretty sure that if you were as important as you THINK you are... they would be paying you enough money to actually live in Manhattan.

sitemeter tells all...

Ok... who is reading the blog from Dublin, Ireland? And do you have a spare room I can stay in when I'm on my sabbatical in '09?

these are the days my friends and these are my days my friends...

So, last night I went to see a "concert version" of "Einstein on the Beach" at Carnegie Hall... performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, led by Philip Glass and Michael Reisman.

I was moderately disappointed.

Not that there weren't moments that were sublime and goosebump-inducing. But there were also flat out miscues, and saxophones playing it what sounded like the wrong key for a few bars, and big gaps in the singing while the whole chorus ran out of breath at once, and flat warbly notes by the soprano in the aria, and the violinist's second string was out of tune for one of the sections. I mean... I know it's a fucking difficult piece of music, but it's also the PHILIP GLASS ENSEMBLE. Seems to me they should be up to the task.

And I know this makes me a Philip Glass snob, but the performance was too short. It came in at about 2:50, WITH an intermission... and I'm sorry... anything less than four hours is NOT a proper experience of "Einstein". And I know the work well enough to tell when they were leaving stuff out. (Mostly bits of the "Trial" sections.)

But like I said - parts of it were awesome. "Prematurely Air-Conditioned Supermarket" had the original woman reading the monologue, which was very cool. "Building" was good. (The section with the saxophone that sounds like Pink Floyd.) "Spacsehip" was great. The violin-heavy parts like "Dance 2" were pretty good, although much faster than the recordings I know... and I think the violin part is too indistinct the way he was sawing away at it.

I still don't feel like I've really SEEN it, though... I don't think it's the same without the staging. The new director of the NYC Opera has promised a revival in 2009. I'll be there. AND I'll be listening for the mistakes, dammit... so let's get it TIGHT next time.


(PS> NEVER get the $19 balcony seats at Carnegie Hall. The view is fine, the sound is fine, but I have never been more uncomfortable at a concert... hell, I've never been more uncomfortable on an AIRPLANE. There is barely room for my FEET between my chair and the next row, and my knees were actually extending over the back of the chair in front of me. How old IS Carnegie Hall? Was it built when people were still really short??)

"Финансирование предпринимательского бизнеса или...?"

What in the name of fuck?

Does anyone know if you can set up a Mail.app rule to ignore and mark as spam any mail message with a subject line in Cyrillic characters?? I'm sure as hell not buying any black market Viagra from some former Soviet republic.

not as bad as it could have been...

The first "winter storm" of sorts has come and gone. Barely an inch of snow Saturday night, followed by an inch of ICE last night. I practically needed a blow torch to get my car thawed this morning, but once I got going, the roads were fine, thanks to the Very Busy Snowplows that kept me up all freakin' night. It is pretty bleak this morning, though. Standing at the train station looking at the tracks disappear into the fog and snow and ice-covered trees, with the abandoned-for-50-years cargo cars that sit across from our station... stencil some Cyrillic letters over the "Northern Pacific" signs and you could shoot a movie set in Cold-War-era Siberia.

I'm glad I know what I'm teaching today, since I'm really too damned tired to THINK this morning. It's time to start wrapping things up in both classes anyway. The reality of "December" has finally hit now that the calendar page has turned. I've been saying for weeks that we'll talk about this or that class topic "next month", but really... December isn't much of a month. I'm giving exams around the 18th , so I really only have 4 or 5 classes left in each course. Which is very exciting.

Usually around this time I start to think about next semester's courses. Not this year. Next semester will be pretty straightforward. Nope... I'm already planning my class for Spring 2009!!! The Administration is opening up my Introductory Astronomy enrollment from 25 to 60 in an experiment with "larger lecture classes". (Those of you who attended or teach at large state colleges can stop snickering over the thought that 60 students is a "large lecture".) I'm even going to get a TA!! This is unheard of in the sciences here, because we don't have a graduate program. (We'll have to hire some unemployed grad student off the street, I guess. Maybe Craigslist?) To celebrate, I've decided to make the course even more popular by changing the course title to "Life in the Cosmos" and making it an astro-biology course. Nothing draws the students in like ALIENS! Anyway, I love big giant faceless lectures, so I'm really excited. Sometimes when there are more than 40 students, you reach that "applause" threshold. Love that.

I may also be teaching a Science and Religion class with a guy from the religious studies department. Just imagine.

it's a jungle out there...

This exchange does not bode well for the future of a boy who already skips tiles at the mall, and who spent the morning of November 1st categorizing all of his Halloween candy into chocolate/hard/chewy piles...

GIRL: I don't get it, why do you always wear your shirts like that?

BOY: I just like them buttoned up all the way... Like MONK!!

I think we may not let him watch that anymore. He's too young to realize that the star is meant to be the "hero" and yet NOT meant to be a "role model".